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Success of Curiosity mission could lead to manned flight to Mars

By Adam Poulisse, Pasadena Star-News

Posted:
08/05/2013 01:01:41 PM MDT

Updated:
08/05/2013 01:02:02 PM MDT

(AP Photo/Brian van der Brug, Pool)

"Seven minutes of terror."

That's how NASA officials refer to the August 2012 nail-biting approach and landing of Curiosity, beginning its fruitful first year of exploration of Mars, including the discovery that it was once a habitable planet for microbial life.

For John Grotzinger, the mission's chief scientist, it may have been the most intense moments of his career.

Grotzinger sat in the back of a room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory one year ago Monday, watching with the mission's flight team, and the rest of the world, as the Curiosity rover hurtled at 13,000 mph in an uncertain descent onto Mars' surface.

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"You could see the tension in their faces," he said. "Then at some point, all of us managers in the back row were standing up, with two exceptions: a NASA administrator and a NASA associate administrator, both of them former astronauts. They were so much more relaxed than we were. They had been involved in scarier things."

Once the dust settled and Curiosity took to the red landscape, its crew discovered "a habitable environment that was so benign that we as humans could have taken a glass of water and drank it without any grave consequences," Grotzinger said.

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NASA officials and Curiosity crew members will host a public event celebrating the one-year anniversary of the rover's landing at 9 a.m. Tuesday in Washington, D.C. It will air on NASA's television station and stream live on its website. A lecture by Ashwin R. Vasavada, deputy project scientist of the Mars Science Laboratory, will be held at the von Karman Auditorium at JPL at 7 p.m. Thursday.

(NASA/JPL-Caltech/Rex)

Puttering along the Red Planet's surface at just 300 feet an hour, Curiosity is a habitability mission that utilizes a mobile laboratory to discover if the Red Planet could have at one point sustained life. The laboratory not only allows scientists to discover evidence of water, but characterize it and its chemistry, and if that chemistry is consistent with the type of environment that could sustain micro-organisms.

That evidence was found just 500 meters away from where the rover landed in Gale Crater.

"The mission was slated for two years to give us the chance to hopefully discover a habitable environment," Grotzinger said. "Eight months into the mission, we discovered the habitable environment that we had built and hoped for."

(AP Photo/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Curiosity's drills also have probed rocks along Mars' surface to discern if they contain the building blocks that could have once sustained life -- oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and carbon.

"We imagine that if these simple microbes ever existed on Mars, they would have been able to use the chemical energy stored in the rocks that Curiosity discovered," Grotzinger said.

"It's cool to find evidence of water, but it might have re-worked any organic compounds that were there."

Curiosity has traversed 1,500 meters, or nearly a mile, since landing on Mars a year ago.

A Mars day, or sol, lasts 24 hours and 40 minutes. The Curiosity team operated on Mars time for the first 90 sols, but is now back on Earth time. Missions for the first four sols already were planned and uploaded to Curiosity during its trip to Mars, allowing the team an easier transition into Mars time, according to Beth Dewell, one of three tactical mission managers for Curiosity. "We actually saw some of our first images right then and there on landing in real time, so that was really exciting," Dewell said. "We weren't really sure we were going to get them right away."

Last year, 905 people were part of the Curiosity mission. That number has dropped to 763 this year.

About 30 people, not including the science team, report to work for the Curiosity mission daily, be it engineering, uplinking commands or downlinking data.

Currently, the Mars mission is on a timeline of just under 10 hours, as opposed to a year ago, when it was on a 16-hour timeline.

"That's based on process efficiencies that we have and the experience of the team as well," Dewell said. "We've been doing this for a year, so we're getting really good at it."

As mission manager, Dewell's job is to ensure the team doesn't take any undo risks, particularly with new activities being executed on any particular day.

Whenever the team does a first-time activity, it is always done with a special, strategic plan.

"We're doing things in similar ways (to the beginning of the mission), but of course there are terrain dependencies," Dewell said. "We're driving on Mars. This is our first time driving here. There are differences in rocks, differences every single day in what we can see across the images that we've taken."

Curiosity can drive over any rock less than 2 feet tall, but it has to drive around anything higher to avoid the possibility of flipping over.

Being stringent and cautious with missions has kept Curiosity in good shape and free of wear and tear.

A mirror of the Curiosity rover, a 7-foot tall, 9-foot wide, 10-foot long , 2,000-pound engineering model, sits in a laboratory at the Mars Yard at JPL, a testing site resembling the Mars landscape. Before a sequence of commands is given to Curiosity on Mars, it is tested on the engineering model at the Mars Yard.

"We don't want to just send out a command or a sequence without testing them out first on Earth," said Jim Wang, the Mars Science Laboratory deputy test bed lead. "We are very conservative, we are very cautious. We know that it's an important mission, and it's expensive equipment and instruments."

Last week, drill systems administrator Aaron Stehura was testing for high-tilt operations. Currently, Curiosity is qualified to only drill on seven-degree slopes, but the team is testing the engineering model on the Mars Yard to eventually drill at 20 degrees.

"We're concerned about the rover slipping, and if we have the drill inside of a rock, we could break the arm," Stehura said. "Of course, we don't want to break this priceless asset that we have on Mars."

Whereas Curiosity has seen little to no damage on Mars, the engineering model on Earth once suffered a cracked wheel while roving the Mars Yard, Wang said.

It helps that the rover weighs much less on Mars.

"What history shows is these things are built to last, and it's going to keep going and going for some time," Grotzinger said.

The warranty for Curiosity previously approved by NASA expires next June, but is expected to continue after a formal application process is submitted, according to reports.

By no fault of the team, Curiosity has experienced an occasional anomaly over the year, like a ground tool breaking, or a processing problem, which could hinder uplinking to the rover.

The biggest anomaly so far in Curiosity's one year on Mars was a memory glitch on sol 200. The A side of the computer system malfunctioned, forcing the team to switch to the B side.

"It was a two-part anomaly," Dewell said. "Part of it was a hardware problem, part of it was a latent software problem that we had. We ended up sending up a flight software patch in order to mitigate the flight software problem."

Even though the A side is working again, crews have been working on the B side.

That was the original plan, but Curiosity ended up traveling in the opposite direction during the first couple of sols, confounding the media, Grotzinger said.

"We had a hunch that something good might have been there, and that hunch paid off," he said.

The fast-tracked success of Curiosity could pave the way for more complicated missions to Mars.

"Successes of our Curiosity -- that dramatic touchdown a year ago and the science findings since then -- advance us toward further exploration, including sending humans to an asteroid and Mars," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a news release. "Wheel tracks now, will lead to boot prints later."

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